This study is constructing a general theory linking adolescent social alienation, drug abuse, and counter-culture religious cults. Preliminary work indicates that the decline of the protestant ethic and the emergence of bureaucratic vocational and educational institutions has led to a normative crisis. Drugs are used because they seem to alleviate the adolescent anomie, communal deprivation and identity confusion resulting from this crisis of legitimation. Continued drug use leads to an exacerbation of these problems and creates new ones. Counter-culture religions rehabilitate as they provide alternative meaning systems to the declining protestant ethic and as they provide loci of community within the interstices of the impersonal technocracy. The solutions different cults provide vary in their implications for social integration and personality development. We are constructing a typology which will specify the types of clientele, the social structure and symbolic process, and the socially reintegrative effects of various categories of movements. We are using participant observation techniques and the grounded theory methodology of Glaser and Strauss.